Chapter 2: The Things That Refuse to Bend

By the time Dona reached the hospital, the stiffness had spread beyond her knees.

It had not happened all at once, and that was perhaps the most frightening part of it. There had been no sudden seizure, no dramatic collapse, no blinding flash of pain that might have offered a clear dividing line between the woman she had been that morning and the stranger she was becoming. Instead, the rigidity had crept through her legs with the quiet determination of something that knew it had plenty of time. Her ankles had begun to feel reluctant when she tried to move her feet, her thighs remained unnaturally tense, and her hips had acquired a heavy, resistant quality that made even the smallest adjustment of position a laborious undertaking. She could still move her toes, and she could still feel the paramedic’s fingers against her skin, but the ordinary cooperation between intention and movement had somehow broken down. Her body seemed to have received an instruction she had never heard, and it was following that instruction with a terrifying obedience.

The ambulance smelled of disinfectant, rubber, and the faint metallic odor that Dona had always associated with hospitals, although until that afternoon she had never had a particularly good reason to associate any of those things with herself. She lay strapped to the stretcher, staring at the ceiling while the paramedic monitored her vital signs and asked questions that she answered increasingly impatiently. Had she ever experienced weakness in her legs? No. Any history of neurological illness? No. Back pain, numbness, previous injuries, unusual medication, recreational drugs? No, no, no, and absolutely not. Had she been involved in any other accident recently? She almost laughed at that one, then remembered the old woman lying on the road, and the laugh died before it could escape her throat.

“You’re sure you can’t bend either knee?” the paramedic asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Not even a little?”

“I’ve been trying for the last hour. What do you think?”

He accepted the rebuke without taking offense, which irritated her even more. Dona wanted somebody to become alarmed. She wanted the paramedic to exchange a worried look with his colleague, to say that he had never seen anything like this before, and to admit that whatever was happening to her was far beyond the ordinary range of human experience. Instead, he continued writing on his clipboard, checking her pulse and blood pressure, and speaking in the same calm voice he might have used to explain a minor ankle sprain.

“Try not to force anything,” he told her. “The hospital will investigate the cause.”

“The cause is that I can’t bend my legs.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“No, you don’t.” She turned her head toward him, feeling a sudden, irrational anger that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the fear. “You keep saying that you understand, but you don’t. I can tell my legs to move, and they don’t move. I can feel them, I can feel everything, but they’re like—”

She stopped, searching for a comparison that did not make her sound insane.

“Like they’re made of wood,” she finished.

The paramedic looked at her for a moment.

“All right,” he said gently. “We’ll make sure they examine that properly.”

Dona turned back toward the ceiling. She had the unpleasant feeling that she had just told him something he would remember only as an amusing detail in an otherwise routine shift.

At the hospital, the routine ended almost immediately.

The emergency department was crowded, and for several minutes Dona was left in a curtained bay while nurses moved around her, asking questions and attaching monitoring equipment. A young doctor examined her legs, tested her reflexes, and asked her to push against his hands with her feet. She could do that, although the movement was weaker and more awkward than she expected. He asked her to pull her toes toward her face, then point them away, and she managed both movements with visible concentration. When he placed his hands beneath her knees and asked her to bend them, however, the joints barely moved.

“Does that hurt?” he asked.

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“It feels as if something is holding them straight.”

He tried again, applying a little more pressure, and Dona instinctively caught his wrist.

“Stop. Please.”

He released her immediately.

“Sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You aren’t hurting me. You just can’t make them move.”

The doctor straightened and looked down at her legs. He was young enough to have the smooth, slightly uncertain face of someone who had not yet learned how to disguise every doubt, and Dona saw that uncertainty clearly. He checked her muscle tone again, examined her ankles, and asked her to relax. She tried so hard that her jaw began to ache, but the rigidity remained. Her knees lay extended beneath the hospital sheet, their outlines perfectly ordinary, without swelling or bruising, and there was nothing visible to suggest why they had become so stubbornly immobile.

“Have you had any back pain today?” he asked.

“No.”

“Any headache, dizziness, or changes in your vision?”

“No. Doctor, please, can you tell me what’s wrong?”

“We’re going to run some tests.”

It was not an answer, and his expression told her he knew it.

They began with blood tests, followed by X-rays and a neurological examination. A more senior physician arrived, introduced himself as Dr. Marin, and repeated much of the process with a seriousness that made Dona feel both reassured and frightened. He examined her reflexes, tested her sensation, and used the blunt end of a small instrument to check whether she could distinguish pressure and touch in different areas of her legs. She could. Her feet were warm, her circulation appeared satisfactory, and she could move her toes when instructed. There was no obvious injury to account for the stiffness, no swelling around the knees, and no sign of the kind of trauma that would ordinarily prevent the joints from bending.

“Have you ever had a problem with muscle spasms?” Dr. Marin asked.

“Never.”

“Any recent infections?”

“No.”

“Any new medication?”

“No.”

He paused before asking the next question, and Dona recognized the expression. It was the look doctors sometimes adopted when they were preparing to suggest that the problem might not be entirely physical, a look of careful diplomacy that made her want to throw something.

“You’re obviously under considerable stress,” he said. “You were involved in a serious accident today, and you witnessed the death of another person. Sometimes the nervous system responds to overwhelming stress in ways that can produce very real physical symptoms.”

“You think I’m imagining this?”

“No. Absolutely not.” He answered quickly, and his sincerity seemed genuine. “I am saying that stress can affect movement. But we aren’t going to assume that is the explanation until we’ve investigated other possibilities.”

Dona looked down at her legs.

“Then investigate them,” she said. “Please.”

Dr. Marin nodded and ordered further tests.

The hours that followed blurred into a succession of examinations, questions, and increasingly uncomfortable silences. Her blood results showed no obvious abnormality that explained the rigidity. The X-rays revealed no fracture or dislocation. A more detailed neurological assessment failed to identify a clear pattern corresponding to a familiar disorder, and the doctors could find no convincing evidence of a spinal injury, a major nerve problem, or an acute illness that would account for the sudden loss of normal movement. They checked her electrolytes, considered possible medication effects, and discussed neurological conditions that could cause abnormal muscle tone. Every test seemed to close one door without opening another.

Dona watched their faces as they studied the results. At first they looked attentive, then puzzled, and eventually guarded, as if the problem had become an awkward guest nobody knew how to ask to leave.

“Could it be some kind of rare neurological disease?” she asked Dr. Marin late that evening.

“It is one of the possibilities we’re considering, but your presentation doesn’t fit neatly into a specific diagnosis.”

“Could I be paralyzed?”

“You aren’t showing the usual signs of complete paralysis. You have sensation, and you can generate movement in your feet. Your problem appears to be with the movement of the larger joints, although we haven’t established why.”

“Then why can’t I bend my knees?”

He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“That is precisely what we’re trying to determine.”

There was no impatience in his voice, only exhaustion and the frustration of a man whose knowledge had brought him to the edge of an answer and then stopped. Dona had always imagined that doctors possessed some invisible map of the body, a guide that allowed them to trace every symptom to its source if they looked long enough. Now she was beginning to understand that medicine had blank spaces, some of them large enough for a person to fall into.

She spent the night in a hospital bed with both legs extended beneath the sheets, unable to find a comfortable position. When she tried to turn onto her side, her knees remained straight, forcing her hips and shoulders to move together in an awkward, uncoordinated roll. If she wanted to sit higher, a nurse had to help adjust the bed and support her legs so they would not slide sideways. Even the simple act of pulling the blanket over her feet required assistance, because bending forward placed an uncomfortable strain on her hips and lower back, while reaching down between her rigid thighs was difficult and humiliating.

She slept in fragments. Each time she began to drift off, she remembered the old woman’s face, and her eyes opened again.

At three in the morning, she took her phone from the bedside table and searched for the word the woman had spoken. She tried several spellings, then looked up medical terms related to stiff joints, muscle rigidity, and sudden immobility. The search results were full of frightening possibilities, most of which seemed unrelated to her condition. She read about neurological disorders, autoimmune diseases, muscle spasms, and rare syndromes, but none of them explained why she had been completely normal before the accident and unable to bend her knees afterward.

Eventually, she typed a single word into the search box.

Stiff.

The results were ordinary, almost insulting in their simplicity. Stiffness was a symptom, not a diagnosis. It could be caused by injury, inflammation, prolonged immobility, muscle tension, or a variety of illnesses. There was nothing in the word itself that suggested a curse, a prophecy, or anything else that belonged in a story told around a fire.

Dona stared at the screen until the letters began to blur.

Then she remembered the old woman’s hand closing around her wrist.

She shut the phone off and pulled the blanket up to her chest, although the room was warm.

For the first time since the accident, she allowed herself to consider the possibility that the woman had known what was going to happen.